…the international homeopathy producer, Boiron, is threatening a lone Italian blogger because he dared to criticize their product, Oscillococcinum. The blogger, Samuele Riva, wrote two articles on his blog, blogzero.it, criticizing what our own Mark Crislip has called “oh-so-silly-coccinum.”

…

Boiron is the largest manufacturer of homeopathic products in the world and the second largest manufacturer of over-the-counter products in France.What they are doing to this small blogger, in my opinion, is nothing less than corporate thuggery. They are using their resources and their corporate lawyers to try to silence completely legitimate criticism of their pseudoscientific products. Of course, they will only succeed in magnifying that criticism.

Steven Novella goes on to say what there was to criticise.

Riva suggested that Boiron’s oscillococcinum has no active ingredient. Well, let’s see- the company lists the active ingredient in this product as “Anas barbariae hepatis et cordis extractum 200CK HPUS.” The “200C” means that the listed ingredient was diluted with a 1:100 dilution 200 times. Serial dilution is a funny thing – a 200c dilution is the equivalent of diluting 1ml of original ingredient into a volume of water that is the size of the known universe. This is far far beyond the point where there is any reasonable chance of there being even a single molecule of original ingredient left.

And then, even if it’s not diluted…

That’s right, oscillococcinum does not even exist – essentially Boiron takes fairy dust and then dilutes it out of (non)existence. The “anas barbariea hepatis” is basically duck liver, which is supposed to contain the most concentrated nonexistent oscillococcinum. It’s a pseudoscience trifecta.

…

I hope Boiron does draw a line in the sand over their oscillococcinum product, and that it becomes the center piece of a broader public discussion about homeopathy. Most of the public does not understand what homeopathy actually is. They think it means “natural” or “herbal” medicine. They have no idea that homeopathy is about taking fanciful ingredients with a dubious connection to the symptoms in the first place, and then diluting them into oblivion, then placing a drop of the pure water that remains and placing it on a sugar pill. The resultant pill is then supposed to contain the magic vibrations of the original substance.

25 Responses to “The magic vibrations of the original substance”

Ah, the ‘water has memory’ crowd strikes again. I am reasonably certain that homeopathy does not exist; otherwise the city of London would be dead or violently ill down to the last man, woman and child — water (including toilet water) goes through the average Londoner roughly seven times.

Homeopaths claim that you have to shake the water (in a specially vigorous, magical way) after each dilution to release the power of whatever substance you’re diluting into the water. Apocryphal stories exist of the Father of Homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, cautioning his disciples to store their homeopathic remedies carefully during transport, so that unduly rough roads wouldn’t make the mixtures so potent as to be harmful to the recipients.

Homeopathy is the quintessential snake oil. Until all ‘alternative medicines’ are subjected to the same standards as conventional medicines, the gullible public will be continually fleeced.

Charlatans will always be with us, however, the fault lies with our regulatory authorities and members of the medical professions and pharmacists who have failed to protect the public from those bastards. Many pharmacists even promote alternative medicines, as they’re usually a ‘nice little earner’.

It’s not as bad in the US, but homeopathy has to be confronted wherever it’s seen. And, as Steven Novella points out, it should be the easiest part of SCAM to confront. If I have to explain to you why acupuncture doesn’t work, I have to ask you to accept its repeated failure in clinical trial; I’ll have trouble telling you why it doesn’t work. But homeopathy? All I need is elementary school science. Matter, including medication, is made of molecules. By design, there are no molecules here. Get it? As the sympathetic National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine says,

There are challenges in studying homeopathy and controversies regarding the field. This is largely because a number of its key concepts are not consistent with the current understanding of science, particularly chemistry and physics.

I teach pharmacy students at the beginning of their professional study. Last fall, my partner was experiencing irritation in her eyes, and I walked into a RiteAid where some of our students and alumni work. One offered to assist me and recommended some homeopathic eye drops. I was apoplectic. Next class, I did a homeopathic sleeping pill overdose demonstration and lectured the students on just how unethical it is to sell material labeled as medication that you know, with certainty, is useless.

It was fun. I think I might do it again. To quote Ben Goldacre, Stick with me, science is fun when you’re making people look stupid.

Simon Singh had financial resources available to him that this blogger in Italy certainly doesn’t have. If they can win a suit (or settle out of court) against some poor blogger, other bloggers may take notice and be more reticent. I hope there is an organization that can help this guy with his defense.

Perhaps skeplawyer can help me out here. Is the tactic here that they figure the blogger just can’t afford court costs regardless of court result, so he’ll just stop or retract it, or something? Because it seems to me, that if this sees the inside of a court room, with a little help with research, his claims wo0uld be pretty easily held up.

Is this a case where it would require them to pick on the “wrong” blogger (ie one who had means to take it to court) and they could end up looking pretty silly?

David… even if Mr. Riva feels the need to take the page down to protect himself, I think this is still a win for our side. One page may come down, but dozens of new ones have gone up talking about the issue.

I hope your impromptu class in professional ethics had an effect, the problem is that there’s big money in snake oil. What’s of more concern to me, is that some conventionally trained health professionals seem to be able to accept these mutually exclusive paradigms simultaneously, or at least claim that they do.

My wife was a nurse and, even after years of training and nursing practice, she still believed in the effectiveness of ‘alternative medicines’. The fact that homeopathy is complete drivel is obvious, even to me, a business graduate, with no science education beyond high school, however, I was unable to convince her.

I’ve always assumed that the growth of alternative medicines is a symptom of failure in Western health systems, or perhaps a belief in magic by a large minority of the public.

Well if they just sold the duck liver. as foie gras or a paste, it would be expensive and people would probably just eat it thus not getting the homeopathic benefit of duck liver diluted a few million times……but, by the reckoning of Homeopathy, eating it as a paste would be an extremely dangerous overdose. One wonders why duck liver eaters aren’t dropping dead in the streets everywhere.

I’ve always assumed that the growth of alternative medicines is a symptom of failure in Western health systems, or perhaps a belief in magic by a large minority of the public

I’d argue for the opposite. Medicine in the West is so effective that people feel safe to dabble in “alternatives” without ever acknowledging what it is that keeps them safe. I’m old enough to have a family memory of what life was like BF (before Florey). But most people don’t have those memories so they fall prey to the bogus equation “healthy = natural” even though they must at some level know it’s marketing flim-flam.

David M: Perhaps skeplawyer can help me out here. Is the tactic here that they figure the blogger just can’t afford court costs regardless of court result, so he’ll just stop or retract it, or something? Because it seems to me, that if this sees the inside of a court room, with a little help with research, his claims wo0uld be pretty easily held up.

Is this a case where it would require them to pick on the “wrong” blogger (ie one who had means to take it to court) and they could end up looking pretty silly?

In answer to your first question, yes, that is what they do. It can even be used against writers with resources (ie, a writer for a wealthy media organisation). When the BCA sued Simon Singh, they sued him personally, not the Guardian media group, in the hope of bankrupting him as well as shutting him up.

There is an old legal principle (known as ‘champerty’ or ‘maintenance’) that one is not supposed to ‘maintain’ another person’s suit at law unless one is formally joined as a party to the action (a process called, obviously enough, joinder). This is to make sure that justice is kept open and that trials are not fought as proxy battles by shadowy parties behind the scenes.

Since most people want money when they win, maintenance in the case of a defendant is almost never an issue (indeed, the Singh case was the first time I’d ever seen the deliberate bringing of a suit against a man of straw when there was the option of suing an organisation well able to pay damages). Both behaviours are considered highly improper (maintenance and suing a man of straw when there is a wealthy employer to sue).

I wrote about this particular aspect of the Singh case in more detail here:

Sometimes, however, a poor but thoughtful defendant who gets lots of pro-bono help (from lawyers and non lawyers, thereby evading the ‘maintenance’ rules) can turn the process on its head and make life hell for even the wealthiest plaintiff. This is what happened in the McLibel case in Britain:

[…] on the DL, the controversy will go away. Unfortunately for Boiron, there’s a whole network of skeptical bloggers not only aware of the scam but more-than-willing to take on the scammers. And we’ve been here […]

There’s an absolute ton of blogs popping up all over to support Riva, but I don’t think that very many of them have actually read the original blog or the letter that was sent – the instant comparisons to Singh and the automatic painting of Boiron as the heartless, faceless, corporate monster without any attention paid to the actual blog itself would certainly seem to indicate that. I think that the whole situation deserves further scrutiny before Riva is painted as a hero of modern science. To be clear, I don’t like what Boiron are doing, but to paint the blogger as a total innocent who’s being sued because he spoke ill of homoeopathy is misrepresenting the situation, as as someone who prizes rational thinking, I can’t help but be irked by that.

The fact of the matter is that Riva used copyrighted imagery without their permission, and stated that they made claims which they did not. He seems to think it’s splitting hairs, and indeed, invoked the “everyone does it so it’s ok” defence when questioned on the use of copyrighted imagery. When the problem with stating “Boiron said it cures flu”, he again said it was splitting hairs, saying that he shouldn’t get in trouble because of imperfect sentences, but it’s really much more than that. There’s a reason that Boiron don’t have the word “cure” in their promotional literature, and it’s because it would be against the law for them to claim a cure where there isn’t one. Riva said that this is what they are claiming, and that falls very neatly under libel law in Italy, where attribution of a determined fact that is untrue has both a specified fine, and penalty. By putting words in their mouth, Riva left himself open to criticism and sanctions – to say that they claim it’s a flu cure is, factually speaking, untrue.

I think that the response is disproportionate, but I also think that sloppy blogging and a casual attitude to copyright have left Riva in a vulnerable position. It’s one thing to criticise homoeopathy, but it’s another to libel a company, and the two shouldn’t become so intermingled in the minds of the public that we begin to think it’s ok to libel someone or something as long as it’s peripherally related to something we believe to be nonsense.

Libel laws are, in many countries, downright punishing, and sadly, open to abuse, but here’s the rub – if we want the law to change, to better protect bloggers and authors and anyone else who wishes to share an opinion, then we also have to play nice with the existing laws. Direct criticism of a company or their product is a difficult thing to do, and there is a fine, often poorly defined, line between valid criticism and outright libel. You can be critical of a company or product if you have evidence to back up that criticism, but you cannot invent evidence to support a criticism. You can share your opinion of a product or company, but you can’t put words in their mouth. In short, you can’t libel a company simply because you don’t believe in their product, and you can’t use their copyrighted imagery to help you libel them. I have sympathy for the position that Riva now finds himself in, but I also hope that others take this as a cautionary tale and learn from the mistakes that were made.

Interesting. All of that homeopathic crap is for sale at my local high end grocery store right across from the pharmacy. I asked the pharmacist how they had the nerve to sell it and he just shook his head. I’m not that naive, I know it’s all about money and what people are willing to pay for.